What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.

The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.

Wherever a man commits a crime, God finds a witness. Every secret crime has its reporter.

What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.

Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.